THE UNSPOKEN WORD, Third Sunday of Easter - Acts 2:14 to 33; I Peter 1: 17 to 21; Luke 24:13 to 35

[It is very important for you to read at least the Gospel in your Bible or other worship aide before reading the homily.] Acts 2:14 to 33; I Peter 1: 17 to 21 and Luke 24:13 to 35

Not too long ago, I was visiting a parishioner in rehab. As I passed by the exercise room, I saw an elderly man doing some light weight lifting. I kept going, then did an about-face as I suddenly realized that the “old man” was my own kidney specialist. He’d had a mild cardiac event and was briefly hospitalized. Without his white coat, stethoscope and air of kindly efficiency, I hadn’t “seen” him. Has the same sort of thing ever happened to you? You were out somewhere, perhaps the supermarket or the mall, or even on vacation in a distant area, and you bump into someone with whom you deal regularly ... but they are out of context. Because they “don’t belong” in the setting where you meet them, for a moment you do not recognize them.

I have been a priest going on 51 years. If our Sunday Scriptures are read on a three-year cycle, how many times have I proclaimed today’s Gospel on the Third Sunday of Easter? That’s right, 17. [Note to our mathematics fans: 51 is divisible only by itself, 1, 3 and 17. Cool, huh!?] You would think that, after 17 times preaching on this Gospel, I’d have nothing left to say. Yet each time I revisit this story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, I find something new “on the journey.”

In the past I’ve hurried through the introduction, eager for the part where Jesus takes center stage. But this year I was drawn to the puzzling remark near the beginning of the story: “... but their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him [Jesus].” Why were they “prevented”? Is this some sort of Divine trick? That’s the way it sounds!! In Sacred Scripture, however, especially in the Old Testament, the action of God is sometimes presented in the circumspect passive voice, out of respect for Yahweh-God. People “are told,” rather than “God told (whomever).”

That is not the case with the sentence I just quoted. Here, the easiest explanation is the best one. The two disciples did not recognize Jesus because He was - to put it mildly - “out of context!” The last time they had seen Him, He was dead!! The reader already knows that isn’t the final outcome. But the story requires us to take seriously the experience of those who were witnesses to the crucifixion. Their hopes were dashed; their joy crushed. They were - almost literally - “blind” with grief. When Jesus joins their conversation and asks so innocuously what they had been discussing, their answer is meant to tell us their distress. “Are you the only person from Jerusalem who has not heard the things that happened there these past few days?!” It’s not so much a question as an accusation. Their whole world has been destroyed. How could anybody else be blithely indifferent to the horror and tragedy?!

This meeting is an interruption of their mourning, the only thing sustaining them in their loss. We all understand because we’ve all been there. In the aftermath of a family death, especially a sudden or tragic loss, we gather together more often ... yet all we seem to be able to talk about is the death, the death, the death.

And this common human experience sets into high relief the other information provided in the introductory paragraph.

Only one walker is named: “One of them, Cleopas, by name.” Remember that “Mary, the wife of Cleopas” is one of the women who had watched the crucifixion “from a distance away.” She is one of the women who discovered the empty tomb. She is included in the “some of our number” who “went to the tomb this morning and found it empty” ... but did not actually “see” Jesus. The other “disciple” in our story is most likely this same Mary. So we have a husband and wife, undone by grief, leaving Jerusalem after a Passover visit that went horribly wrong.

Notice where the two disciples were going: Emmaus. It is only about six miles from Jerusalem, an easy walk. [See NOTE * following homily.] So they were going home. That’s where most us go - or wish we could go - when everything falls apart. When we’ve had a hard day at work or at school; when the traffic has been a headache or the weather a nightmare; when we’ve been away for a long time, whether for business or pleasure; we just want to make it home! Even the slogan of Orange Regional Medical Center is, “Make it here; make it home!” A basic principle of Medicine - and especially of physical and occupational therapies - is giving people back the ability to live in their own homes.

We want to go home, even if what Thomas Wolfe said is true, that we “can’t go home again.” “Home is where the heart is” and we hold it dear even if it’s only a memory. That saying was used in a little-known song from the Elvis movie “Kid Galahad”: “Home is where the heart is; And my heart is anywhere you are; Anywhere you are is home to me.” Changing the small “y” to a capital “Y” can help us understand the message of this Gospel. It then expresses the the mystery of Sanctifying Grace, the virtue of Charity by which we are loved by God and empowered to love God in return. But we’re not there yet.

“Home” is the destination in many stories: the “Wizard of Oz,” for a famous example, and, thirty centuries earlier, “The Iliad, the “Odyssey” and the “Aeneid.” It is also the focus of “Salvation History,” the journey of humankind traced through the adventures and misadventures of one people. They set out from a fabled homeland from which they have been barred by their own folly. Noah sought a new home in the aftermath of nature’s fury. Abram left his home, hoping God would find him a better one. Joseph turned a foreign land into a refuge for his people. When Egypt’s safe harbor became a virtual prison, Moses brought them through a desperate desert to a new home. Flourishing there to the point of excess and self-absorption, they lost their home, becoming strangers in a strange land. There they yearned to go home, to rebuild Jerusalem ... and so they did. Afterward. First, Alexander the Great, then Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, took their independence away, their homeland became a prison. Finally, Imperial Rome destroyed their capital city in 70 A.D. But, by then, the Christian journey had begun, a journey without a final destination. “Go,” said Jesus, “teach all nations” ... “As the Father sent Me, so I send you ....”

So, the two disciples are both leaving home, Jerusalem, and going home, Emmaus. And, at the end, they will leave home, Emmaus, and go back home, Jerusalem. Hmmm. This is not double-talk. In the second reading, Saint Peter speaks to his audience about “the time of their sojourn.” To “sojourn” is to stop briefly at one place on a longer trip. Both journeys of Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas mirror the universal journey of the Church, God’s people, through time and place.

When these two disciples describe the murder of Jesus to Jesus (a bit of Saint Luke’s humor?), their description of Jesus is off the mark. “A prophet,” they say, “mighty in deed and word.” They do not recognize Jesus now because they did not really “recognize” Him while He was among them. It’s the epitome of the social situation with which I began my homily: Jesus is out of context. However, the problem is not with Jesus. It is with the two disciples’ “context.” Coming to understand Jesus’ true identity was a challenging “journey” for the First to Third Century Church.

Jesus spends the remainder of the “journey” bringing the duo up to speed. The re-education takes place in four stages. The stages are bracketed the artfully:

First, Jesus “interpreted the Scriptures” for them. That is intellectual growth.

Then, after “the Stranger” vanishes, the two disciples say: “Were not our hearts burning within us as He explained the Scriptures?!” Intellectual knowledge is useless unless it transforms the heart. We need to be converted not only in our thinking but in the way we feel. Luke tells us that they “recognized Him in the breaking of the bread.” The Breaking of the Bread,” is an ancient title for the Eucharist as celebrated liturgically. So, once we know and feel, we must celebrate as a community. Finally, the two “hurried back to Jerusalem.” On their mournful walk home, they were trudging listlessly back to an empty life. Now, in the dark of night, when walking is perilous, they are almost running. When they invited Jesus to stay for supper, the “day is nearly spent.” The journey, as far as they could see, was “nearly over.” But it was not. They are doing two things at once: proclaiming their experience of the Risen Lord in Eucharist and being affirmed in their own belief by the testimony of the Apostles - “The Lord HAS risen. He has appeared to Simon.” Faith and conviction, nourished by Eucharist, leads to community affirmation and lifelong “mission.”

(Parenthetically, it is important to understand that the Empty Tomb visited by Mary, wife of Cleopas, and the other women was not, in itself, proof of the Resurrection. Nor, in First Century Palestine and Second and Third Century Rome, was the testimony of women “legal.” However, in order for the Resurrection to be believable, it had to have been experienced physically by people who knew the earthly Jesus. Peter became the center - and the City of Jerusalem the place - around which those experiences coalesced.)

Cleopas and his wife left home to go home; and then they left home to go home. That is the essential journey of every Christian. It is laid out for us by Scripture. Jesus invites us to embrace it, not - or at least not only - as a set of propositions to which we give consent but also as a lifestyle to which we become increasingly emotionally attached. It is fed by Eucharist and given to us as a free gift from God at our Baptism only to be given away as a free gift to others.

Right now, our journey - as Catholics, as citizens and as people - has taken a bizarre and perilous detour. But we have been there before. We’ve done the journey of grieving, when all we could talk about was our loss. We’ve longed to “go back” to a simpler, safer time and place. We’ve “longed for home” and discovered, to our horror, that we can’t go back there because “there” has been forever altered. Winston Churchill’s famous quote during Britain’s worst experience of the horrors of war says it well: “When you’re going through Hell, just keep on going!” But Saint Catherine of Sienna - whose personal “Hell” had a lot to do with Church politics and the venal men leading It - put it better for Catholics. She said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” The journey continues.

The Coronavirus, with all its horrifying mortality, its inconvenient distancing, and its long-term dislocation of people’s lives and fortunes, is just a dark and dangerous “sojourn” on the long journey each of us - and all of us - must make from home to Home. A Stranger walks with us, one we do not recognize because He is out of context. But, really, we are the ones “out of context.” We need to let Him enlighten us; touch our hearts; feed us -real soon again - on the broken bread of Eucharist; and re-commission us for the journey of discipleship. It is a journey on which we witness - and are witnessed to - about resurrection, Jesus’ and our own. Our society, our community, our family, ourselves, will rise again as we journey toward the Final Resurrection - as we “journey for home.”

* [NOTE: Some biblical scholars have proposed that, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the “headquarters” of the Jerusalem Church, the core Christian community from which all others take their origin, may have regrouped in nearby Emmaus. And, if they did so, it may have been because the “breaking of bread” had been hosted, from the earliest days, in the home offered to Christians by Cleopas and his wife.]